Monthly Archives: October 2025

“Should the Mayor Control N.Y.C. Schools? Mamdani and Cuomo Don’t Agree.” Oddly, They’re Both Wrong.

Posted on by

“Should the Mayor Control N.Y.C. Schools? Mamdani and Cuomo Don’t Agree.” Oddly, They’re Both Wrong.

By Michael A. Johnson

As much as I appreciate The New York Times covering an important public education topic (“Should the Mayor Control N.Y.C. Schools? Mamdani and Cuomo Don’t Agree,” NYT, 10/28/25), this is one of those moments when I fall back on the warnings of my great high school geometry teacher, Mr. Weinberger, who used to remind us: “If you start off with the wrong algorithmic premise, you will absolutely end up with the wrong answer.”

In this case, the see-sawing governance performance show starring centralization vs. decentralization actors has never significantly shifted the academic performance gap calculus in a New York City public school system made up of a majority of Black and Latino students. And when you look at the most intellectually vibrant, inspiring, and empowering schools and programs in the city, those same “majority” students remain a chronically underrepresented minority.

So many years after the passing of our nation’s signature civil rights laws, the condition of Black and Latino students’ access to intellectually enriching programs is still dismal. Specialized high school admission numbers (even with an expanded number of schools) have dramatically dropped in comparison to my 1960s high school days. Those higher numbers from the ’60s are even more startling when you consider that many students didn’t apply to specialized high schools because you could actually receive a quality education at your neighborhood high school—so taking the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) wasn’t such a big deal.

We need to talk about why the pedagogically and strategically deficient governance question is always asked, and answered, in the same narrow and ineffective ways. Part of the problem is deciding whether public education exists to serve its true purpose as a generational progress multiplier, or as an adult jobs-and-consultants payday system. In some schools, districts, and zip codes, the latter clearly prevails. In others, fewer in number, providing a quality education to secure the next generation’s future success remains the real mission.

And lest anyone think this corruption of purpose is solely the work of “evil, powerful White New Yorkers,” let me assure you—there are plenty of us former NYC Black and Latino superintendents (with the scars to prove it) who can share community school board corruption stories you’d swear could only come from the pen of a fiction writer.

But the system’s terrible response to this dysfunction—“removing politics” from education by concentrating political control in the hands of the city’s chief political officer (the mayor)—was doomed from the start. Again, channeling my high school geometry teacher: why did anyone think that would work? Beyond a few incremental “gains,” statistically lifted by the performance of the system’s most advantaged students, mayoral control has never produced sustained, equitable academic excellence.

Now we’re entertaining decentralization 2.0 (or is it 3.0, 4.0, or 5.0?). Yet in this latest iteration, there’s still no mention of—or respect for—the highly impactful activists in any school’s success: the educational supervisors, assistant principals, and principals. As a former superintendent, I learned firsthand the incredible power of school building leadership to drive rapid, significant, and sustained academic improvement.

Black and Latino parents: don’t be hoodwinked, bamboozled, or led astray by voices that sound progressive but will lead your children down the same regressive, underachieving path—regardless of the governance structure. If “teachers and parents” are allegedly given more policymaking power, then no elected or appointed official is responsible for student learning. The teachers will keep their jobs; the consultants will keep their contracts; and the only losers will be Black and Latino families—whose children will continue to feed our criminal justice system.

At some point, the ignored and disenfranchised parents of New York City must demand a first-loyalty-to-children pledge from every elected official who receives their votes. That pledge must compel those officials to do—statutorily and structurally—“whatever is necessary,” including revisiting labor and governance laws, to ensure that every child receives a quality education every year of their school life.
A good place to start is by ending the governance merry-go-round that always leaves the same children on the bottom rung. We need an accountable system that looks nothing like “mayoral control,” powerless educational panels, or faux “parent-teacher” governance models.

Michael A. Johnson is a former NYC teacher, principal, superintendent, and adjunct professor of education. He is the author of two books on school-building leadership: Report to the Principal’s Office: Tools for Building Successful High School Administrative Leadership and Report from the Principal’s Office: A 200-Day Inspirational and Aspirational School Leadership Journal.

Ending Kindergarten Gifted & Talented Screenings Is Right—But It’s a Superficial Political Fix for a Complicated Pedagogical Problem

Posted on by

Ending Kindergarten Gifted & Talented Screenings Is Right—But It’s a Superficial Political Fix for a Complicated Pedagogical Problem

Over the last few weeks, I’ve received numerous emails and calls from across the country asking for my professional opinion on one of New York City’s mayoral candidates’ promises to eliminate the NYCDOE’s Gifted & Talented (G&T) program—starting with kindergarten.

I can’t think of another question I’ve been asked in recent years that has produced more shocked reactions to my answer. I suppose people assumed, based on what they believe about my educational philosophy—or perhaps what they’ve read in media coverage like The New York Times’ “Scores Count” article or the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) journal piece on how my elementary and middle school students passed New York State high school math and science Regents exams. Folks can’t imagine that I would strongly oppose eliminating early G&T screenings.

It’s true that I’ve always advocated for the good educational purposes of standardized exams—as tools to strengthen students’ conceptual, competitive, and performance skills based on learning standards, and as instruments to inform instruction. But I’ve also been a consistent opponent of bad, and sometimes downright deleterious, assessment tools, especially those that confirm and perpetuate unfair advantages.

And this is the place where I usually get into trouble: I will always call out the hypocrisy of public education systems and elected officials. NYC’s Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT), is just as educationally and morally problematic as the kindergarten G&T screening test, largely because it measures the quality of a student’s exposure to consistent, high-quality instruction year after year, something over which a child has absolutely no control.

When I earned my Master’s in Supervision and Administration from Bank Street College, I occasionally observed classes at the Bank Street School (the alma mater of one of the mayoral candidates). I spoke with administrators, teachers, and students. The Bank Street School’s entire educational program could, in many ways, be considered a G&T-based pedagogy. Its methodologies, rooted in Deweyan progressive education, emphasized critical thinking, problem-posing, and problem-solving skills. And yes, the staff also helped students build strong conceptual and technical test-taking skills. Their approach was designed to draw out each child’s inherent gifts and talents while preparing them to perform well on standardized assessments like the SHSAT.

My position, as some have miscategorized, is not about loving standardized exams, but as the old Brooklyn saying goes, my position is simple: “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” And if these are the “gate-keeping” rules of the game, then let’s help the children of disenfranchisement master them.

“Change the joke and slip the yoke.” —Ralph Ellison

I have spent my professional life warning Black and Latino parents, while actively empowering their children educationally, about the twin dangers of liberal paternalism and conservative degradation. They sound and act differently, yet both lead us through endless cycles of centralization and decentralization, one failed and very expensive “closing-the-gap” initiative after another, and still these public-school systems continue to fail the same majority cohort of Black and Brown students.

This current gifted-and-talented debate (one of many over the years) will be no different, because elected officials either lack the knowledge or the will to create public schools where every child, regardless of the school they attend, receives the high-quality education they deserve. Anything less is campaign-commercial talk.

Even if a mayor and their chancellor abolished every K–8 G&T program in the city, the political elephant in the room remains: learning quality inequity would simply reorganize itself by zip code and schools. Some children would still receive G&T-level experiences, while others—trapped in the wrong zip codes and schools—would continue receiving an inferior education.

So let’s explore the educational, developmental, psychological, and social variables that distort or invalidate any attempt to administer or interpret a kindergarten G&T admissions exam accurately. And let’s also examine where both the “ban it” and “keep it” camps fall pedagogically and courageously short; for neither addresses how to effectively support children entering kindergarten who arrive at vastly different points along the pre-kindergarten learning spectrum—regardless of race or ethnicity.

The real question is: how do we design ethical early childhood education screenings, not for exclusionary labeling, but to guide instructional models that embraces “multiple intelligences” and adopts a more male-child-friendly, sound-developmental approach to early childhood teaching and learning?

High-Stakes Admission Testing for Four- and Five-Year-Olds—What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Well, everything.

The Ethical Flaws: Human Developmental and Racially Prejudicial Problems

Applying a high-stakes admissions exam to 4- or 5-year-olds presumes that “giftedness” is fixed at birth—and therefore measurable at that very early stage of human development. Worse, it assumes that giftedness is not equally distributed among the “being born” population. This idea, even if put forward by an atheist assumes that God is favoring some children to be giftedly great in this world and others to be something less-than-great. Or, that nature (for those atheistically inclined), in a random casino-gambling way, somehow placed “giftedness” in the heads of a select group of babies whose parents just happen to be mostly white, wealthy, and well-educated.

Both positions are morally and scientifically indefensible. Children at this age are in a state of rapid and constant neurodevelopmental fluctuation—their attention spans vary widely depending on external stimuli, the language of adults, emotional responses, and their willingness to please authority figures. Their test performance can swing unpredictably based on comfort with the examiner, prior exposure to testing, or even what they ate that morning. These variables are profoundly shaped by home environment, nutrition, access to enrichment, and socio-economic conditions—not by innate “giftedness.”

And let’s be honest: if high school principals like me have trouble convincing some teenagers, especially boys, to treat high-stakes exams as life-changing events, what hope do we have of convincing 4- or 5-year-olds? (Full-disclosure) When my own daughter took the G&T test, we didn’t even tell her what it was. We made up a story about why a friendly stranger wanted to ask her questions. Fortunately, she was a confident graduate of Brooklyn’s Little Sun People preschool, where she had spent years engaging with adults who weren’t her parents and learning in a rich, kindergarten-like environment. On test day, she went into full “please-the-adults” performance mode.

The truth, which educators know but rarely tell the public (perhaps out of fear of further lowering public confidence), is that despite the great work of developmental psychologists like Bruner, Vygotsky, and Piaget, there is still much about the brain and mind we do not know—certainly not enough to justify excluding children from future opportunities at such an early formative age.

What if the G&T exam is not measuring giftedness at all—but rather, a child’s unearned access to “parent-pushing power,” privileged affluence, early literacy exposure, and parental educational attainment? If so, this exam is not assessing brilliance—it’s auditing privilege, parental personalities and family priorities.

As a 40+ year public educator, I’ve quietly observed how veteran teachers, often unconsciously, change their tone and demeanor when two well-educated, well-spoken Black or Latino parents walk into the room. Professional educators, including test administrators, are human. My daughter’s charm, vocabulary, and background won the day—but the truth is her environment gave her enormous advantages: nightly reading, exposure to museums, modern ballet classes, a home library, and an academically rich preschool experience. Meanwhile, countless other children—whose parents, for reasons of work, awareness, or distrust, did not even bring them for G&T testing—were automatically excluded from consideration.

How About This: Let Professional Educators Make Educational Decisions

And finally, the primary reason this critical early childhood decision should be taken out of the hands of all politicians, regardless of party or ideology, and placed in the not-seeking-votes hands of dedicated professional educators. Public education fails large segments of families not because parents don’t care or because children lack ability, but because a high-quality educational product is not equally distributed across the system.

In schools like Bank Street, Stuyvesant, and Bronx Science, there is zero tolerance for instructional incompetence. The open secret of public education is that in too many schools, often those serving our poorest students, there is too much teacher turnover, too many inexperienced teachers for school administrators to coach effectively, and not enough of a critical mass of veteran, very-good to mastery-level teachers capable of sustaining high levels of instructional excellence, that matches high expectations of student capabilities.

And those “very good to mastery-level” teachers, and their school leaders, must operate from what I call, a place of Essential Efficacy: the conviction that educators bear full responsibility for a child’s success, independent of the student’s socio-economic status, language background, or parental influence.

Many of us who led high-performing Title I schools achieved this by becoming Entrepreneurial Principals (see Report from the Principal’s Office, pp. 556–564), closing the resource gap by raising huge amounts of additional funds and building high-efficacy instructional cultures. But more importantly, we succeeded because we, and our staff, believed—deeply—that all children arrive in this world with a unique set of skills and talents, and that it is the sacred duty of professional educators to find and draw out those gifts.

So yes, ending kindergarten G&T testing is the right decision—but for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way. It’s an easy political-rhetorical win, but a meaningless gesture that doesn’t address the deeper disease of educational quality inequity.

And, until we build a system that cultivates every child’s potential with the same fervor, we now reserve for labeling a few as “gifted,” we will keep playing the same mis/under educated rigged game.

The goal isn’t to find the gifted, it’s to bravely grow the gifts inherently existing in all of our students.


There Is an Alarming Amount of Misinformation About the Public-School Superintendent Hiring Process (Parts 1 & 2)

Posted on by

There Is an Alarming Amount of Misinformation About the Public-School Superintendent Hiring Process (Parts 1 & 2)

The “Misinformation Circus”

Watching the current misinformation circus surrounding the topic of the public-school superintendent hiring process (or it’s problems), I believe some of it represents a mean-spirited and cynical attempt to score political points on unrelated issues, such as the predictable operational deficiencies caused by our badly broken national immigration policies, which have little to do with the emotional or educational well-being of children.
But the other side of the misinformation problem, like so many so-called “educational news stories,” is driven by a lack of informed knowledge and by the inclination of some in the news media to seek out the most sensational aspects of a story, not to educate, but to capture the largest number of revenue-generating eyeballs.

I’m not angry with them, for as a lifelong public educator, I understand that electronic and print news services are business entities. Yet, they can also become powerful educational tools when employed in classrooms by professional educators guided by ethical, pedagogically sound, and learning-outcome-driven standards.

1. A Patchwork of Rules and Realities
As someone who has operated on both sides of the superintendent hiring equation—first as a candidate seeking and successfully securing a superintendency, and later as an executive search firm advisory consultant and informal advisor to school board members, I can perhaps shed a little light on what is often presented as a simple and straightforward process, when in truth, the opposite is the case.
Across the United States (and its territories) there are roughly 14,000 school districts, in addition to the school systems operated by the military. Each state establishes its own licensure and certification requirements for superintendents, and every district designs its own search and selection procedures within those parameters. Consequently, there is no national model, only thousands of variations shaped by state law, district culture, and governance structures.
Large urban systems such as New York City, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles add another layer of complexity: they are technically single districts under one state-recognized superintendent (often called a chancellor or CEO), even though they employ multiple community or area superintendents who must also hold valid state credentials.

2. Misunderstood Issues in Personnel Screening
Public confidence in the hiring process is often shaken by rare failures that attract headlines. Yet, as those of us who have worked inside the system know, Human Resources departments generally get it right. Each year they process thousands of new employees, ensuring background checks, references, university degrees, licenses and certifications are in place. There is, however, no good news story when Human Resources, considering the huge number of new employees they process each year, gets it right—as they overwhelmingly do—and those “unacceptable” prospective employees never set foot inside a school building or district.

Still, vulnerabilities exist. Because the U.S. lacks a national school system or a unified educator database, information about an employee’s misconduct may not always follow them across school districts or state lines. Staff who resign before disciplinary proceedings are finalized, or administrators who accept “no-fault” transfers or demotions, can leave behind incomplete personnel records for future background checkers. Further, differing state employee privacy laws often prevent districts from sharing negative employment information.

There is also the persistent problem of employees “pleading down” to much less serious charges—either within a district’s internal disciplinary process or through the legal system, where charges can be reduced below the level of a felony.

Compounding this is the absence of a consistent mechanism for districts to learn when an employee has been arrested for conduct occurring outside of school buildings, beyond the school day, or even outside the city, state, or country. This creates a deeply problematic situation in which most districts must rely on employees to self-report such “illegal” incidents, which can be problematic when there is an arrest and no indictment or conviction.

Unfortunately, law-enforcement agencies vary widely in their communication with school districts. Some are diligent and proactive in notifying school systems of employee arrests, while others are inconsistent—or fail to report such information altogether. In these cases, ironically, the news media often becomes the district’s first, and sometimes only, source of information regarding a school employee’s arrest.

3. The Limits of Detection: Why “Past Bad Acts” Can Go Undiscovered
Here lies a fundamental truth that the public rarely understands: a school district or executive search firm has almost no independent authority to uncover hidden misconduct if that information does not appear in an accessible, verifiable database.

Unlike medicine or law enforcement, education operates without a national professional registry that tracks disciplinary actions or license revocations across state lines. Because public education is a state—not federal—responsibility, each state maintains its own credentialing and revocation system. There is no single national repository where a search firm or district HR team could check whether a candidate had quietly resigned from another state under investigation or settled a disciplinary case out of view.

If the individual’s prior state education agency never revoked or suspended their license, and no criminal conviction was recorded, that history effectively disappears. To the receiving state or district, the candidate appears fully qualified. Even the most diligent search firm can only examine what is legally available: official state certification records, background-check clearances, and reference statements. When those sources are silent, so is the system.

This structural limitation is not due to neglect or incompetence by HR staff or executive search consultants; it is a direct consequence of our federalized educational framework. Since the United States does not operate as a single national school system, there is no centralized data clearinghouse comparable to national databases used in other professions. As a result, both districts and search firms must rely on trust in state-level credentialing agencies—and occasionally, luck—when verifying a superintendent’s professional past.

Understandably, given the enormous workload that often-understaffed state education departments and local school district HR offices must manage, annually certifying thousands of teachers and school-building administrators (and other non-public education professionals), maintaining a centralized list of “bad-behaving” superintendents is rarely a top priority. Yet the absence of a unified, nationwide status reporting and revocation database leaves even the most diligent search teams navigating in partial darkness. Each new superintendent search is forced to depend on its own creative, time-consuming, and sometimes incomplete background-research strategies, rather than drawing from a shared national system of verified information.

4. Licensure and Reciprocity: Who Decides Who Is Qualified?
A crucial, little-understood point is that school districts and search firms have no authority over superintendent licensure. That power rests solely with each state’s education department. When a superintendent relocates to another state, they must request reciprocal certification—a process that differs widely across jurisdictions.

Some states, informally referred to as “gold-card reciprocity states” (for example, New York), get readily accept by another state’s credentialing body: “If New York says you’re qualified, that’s good enough for us.” Others require partial documentation or coursework verification, but few re-investigate an applicant’s complete professional or legal history. Therefore, if a certification were ever granted in error or through lax verification, a hiring district would have no knowledge of it or have the power to overturn it once the state has officially issued the superintendency license.

5. Why Districts Use Executive Search Firms
Critics sometimes question why school boards spend public funds on search firms. The answer is straightforward: the applicant pool is enormous and the stakes are high. A single superintendent vacancy can draw hundreds of applications, many of them formally qualified on paper.

A reputable executive search firm helps the district’s governing body—school board, mayor, or trustees—clarify the leadership qualities, competencies, and values it seeks. These early sessions resemble strategic retreats, where the firm facilitates consensus before the public process begins. Once a clear profile emerges, the firm screens, recruits, and discreetly contacts both active candidates and currently serving superintendents who may be ready for a new challenge.
These non-public exploratory conversations allow both sides to determine fit without destabilizing the candidate’s current district. When news of a superintendent’s departure becomes public prematurely, morale and operations can suffer; hence the use of interim or “caretaker” superintendents while searches conclude.

6. The Bottom Line
The superintendent selection process is neither secretive nor simple. It operates at the intersection of law, policy, politics, and human judgment. Errors make headlines; accuracy does not. Understanding the limits of district authority, the complexities of state licensure, and the professional prudence of using search firms can help the public view these appointments with greater realism and less suspicion.
The goal, after all, is to ensure that the person leading a school district is not merely certified on paper, but genuinely capable of safeguarding and advancing the educational mission entrusted to them.

About the Author:
Michael A. Johnson is a former New York City superintendent, executive search consultant, and school leadership mentor. He has served as a site supervisor for graduate students in school-building leadership programs and as a district mentor to aspiring principals and assistant principals. His work focuses on strengthening ethical, equitable, and high-impact school-building leadership pipelines in public education.